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Whether this should be

Whether this should be the role of a central portal, however, is open to debate. The UK portal owner felt that ‘value-add’ services like visualisations and APIs were best provided by local portals, since they were closer to the data and to user needs. Some were also concerned that focusing too much on visualisations and APIs as portal owners would hamper SMEs that could offer these kinds of services themselves. Similar concerns also came up in discussions about how portal providers might generate revenue from services provided on top of data published via their portal, as explained earlier in the Finance section. 5.3 Understand the data formats different users need to drive improvements Satisfying a diverse range of user needs is a challenge for data portal owners. Engaging with re-use is a cross-cutting theme, necessary to demonstrate impact (and secure funding), understand high value datasets for publication and to seek feedback on operations (see Operations section). Understanding user needs is also part of deciding what data formats will be supported by the portal. The Spanish data portal owners commented that they do not try to change the formats in which publishers choose to make data available, but observed that they had different kinds of users: transparency users, who are usually not data experts and require data in Excel and CSV formats, and data developer users who are looking for APIs. The Romanian portal owner also noted issues regarding the technical literacy of some data users and requests for different formats. In general, providing data in formats that can satisfy a range of data users can be challenging. On the one hand, statisticians tend to require bulk data sets for statistical analysis. App developers, on the other hand, may prefer accessing data via an API. And a significant number of users, without technical data skills, prefer data in formats such as Excel or presented as visualisations or tables. In a 2015 survey, OpenDataMonitor asked for what purposes people downloaded Open Data. 58 Respondents chose multiple purposes, with 43% saying they used Open Data in application development, 22% as part of data journalism, and 78% for ‘play’. Data about transport and traffic, environment and climate and finance attracted highest interest. 59 As part of the same study, the Open Data Institute surveyed 270 businesses in the UK using Open Data to understand which Open Data attributes influence their business strategy. When asked about formats, one participant said: ‘Data need to be in a computer readable format. The format type does not matter,’ and another that ‘access to data via an API is usually a big advantage for us.’ A common mechanism for benchmarking Open Data quality is Tim Berners-Lee’s 5-star system to benchmark Open Data quality. 60 The 5-star system is effectively a technical roadmap for publishing data on the web, with a 5 star rating being for linked data. Alongside this, the Open Data Institute has created Open Data Certificates (ODCs) to extend the 5-star system to measure other aspects of data 58 Open Data Monitor, 2015, Open Data stakeholder report 59 Open Data Monitor, 2015, Open Data stakeholder report 60 5-star Open Data, 2012 40

quality, like documentation and guarantees of availability. As more data becomes available as Open Data, common benchmarks of quality will become more important. For more information about quality metrics, see the Metrics section. The 5-stars of Linked Data are shown in the Figure 6. Figure 6: The 5-stars of Linked Data 61 Each of the data portal owners interviewed were enthusiastic about the potential of linked data. The portal owner for Aragon is currently administering a project called ‘Aragopedia’, which aims to make a website for every municipality in Aragon (there are 731), incorporating linked data. The German data portal owner is also beginning a linked data pilot. The UK Office of National Statistics is testing a linked data pilot, with four linked datasets currently accessible. The Bath:hacked city portal owner described linked data as ‘a very high bar, technically’, with a limited user-base. Aiming for three stars (an open licence, structured data and published in an open format) was perceived to be more achievable. Registers are becoming an increasing focus for governments publishing Open Data, as reliable, up to date (‘authoritative’) reference sources. In the UK, the data programme within Government Digital Service has been prototyping registers of official country names 62 and local authorities in England 63 for 61 5-star Open Data, 2012 62 FCO, 2016, Country register 63 DCLG, 2016, Local authority England register 41